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Slip and Fall

After my rehabilitation for cocaine use the urge to inject with a needle remained. After work, I would socialize with the street people, who had yet to discover coke but were using an injectable drug.

That turned out to be a combination of Talwin and Ritalin. Mixed together correctly and injected , the high was a relaxing heroin type feeling.

Compared to coke, the T’s & R’s, as they were called, saved me a small fortune when compared to cocaine. For $40 I could remain high for several hours. I found a girl who was a lady of the night and a user of the T&R combination who eventually became my girlfriend.

It was 1992 when I decided that my young family shouldn’t see me this way, and that my wife shouldn’t have to suffer from my addiction.

I left my two young daughters and wife (who immediately divorced me). I left the jewelry business for that taxi cab industry, where I could work alongside my girlfriend. We continued to work together and feed our addiction to Talwin and Ritalin. I did this until 1996 when I could no longer find an injectable vein.

We both stopped using drugs for a while and our relationship faded . I just about hit bottom and had a bad slipandfall into a hotel room, where I lived alone. So, continued to work in the Taxi industry.

In the summer of 1996 I moved from the hotel into a rooming house and began to work with AT&T, developing the Internet and related billing systems. Later, the company sold my division to what would become Convergys and I was employed as a supervisor who was drug free. I thought I was clean.

I started to assemble what would become Broadband High Speed Internet. I remained working at Convergys until 2001 when I had another slipand fall. I discovered crack cocaine and, once again, it was back to drugs…..

Every Monday I will post a new blog post (the continuation of my story/the above post). Feel free to follow my blog and comment below.

Hey Lee, we all thought that you had ziggy when you had really ZAGGED. The very best part of the story is the survival part. After all torture that we inflict upon ourselves, the will to survive and thrive is strong enough to carry us forward. After we look back with a clear mind and vision to see what we have done it is just amazing how good our vision is and many people will ask, why couldn’t you see that we’ll before.
My answer for them is, you need to walk in my shoes in order to get that answer, but that was then and this is now. We paid for our sins and survived. Now is our time to enjoy life and all that it has to offer and all that we missed along the way.

Thanks bigdaveg. Keep reading the story. I was motivated by Rob Ford to tell it like it is. His addiction I understand well. Learned about that from customers in the taxi who had the same challenge. The ability to pick yourself up and shake an addiction is about 33%. You quit or you die or you go to jail. It took me until 2009 to quit drug’s. It took me until October 7 to quit smoking cigarettes. I still have a few more Monday blogs to write so I can complete this story and put the years of addiction behind me.

Len, I used to be a 500+ pounds out of shape man. Today, I’m not, I think I know exactly what you are going through. We still have to get together for that coffee. Let’s do it sooner than later.
‘ Big ‘ Dave